Isotope study reveals that the solar system was created from "poorly mixed cake batter."

 By Carnegie Institute of Science 

January 27, 2023

                                   According to recent study conducted by Nicole Nie and Da Wang of Carnegie, Earth's potassium arrived by meteoritic delivery service. Their research, which was published in the journal Science, demonstrates that certain primordial meteorites have a different combination of potassium isotopes than do other, more chemically treated meteorites. The processes that built our solar system and established the makeup of its planets can be better understood with the aid of these findings.

Nie, a former Carnegie postdoc currently at Caltech, stated that "the severe circumstances seen in stellar interiors enable stars to create materials through nuclear fusion." We can follow the evolution of this material across time since "each stellar generation seeds the raw material from which succeeding generations are produced."

It is possible for some of the material created inside stars to be ejected out into space, where it gathers as a cloud of gas and dust. One of these clouds burst into our sun's shape more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Around the developing star, the leftovers of this process created a revolving disc. These remnants eventually solidified into the planets and other solar system objects, including the parent bodies that later disintegrated to form asteroids and meteorites.

Wang, who is currently at Chengdu University of Technology, said, "By analysing changes in the isotopic record maintained inside meteorites, we can identify the parent materials from which they arose and establish a geochemical chronology of our solar system's evolution."

Each element has a specific amount of protons, but the neutron counts of its isotopes vary. The distribution of various isotopes of the same element across the solar system reflects the composition of the material cloud that gave rise to the sun. The isotopic composition of meteorites may be used to establish how many stars contributed to this so-called solar molecular cloud, but how evenly they distributed their contributions is unknown.

Wang and Nie analysed the ratios of three potassium isotopes in samples from 32 distinct meteorites along with Carnegie colleagues Anat Shahar, Zachary Torrano, Richard Carlson, and Conel Alexander.

The fact that potassium is a so-called moderately volatile element—one with a low boiling point and a high degree of evaporation—makes it particularly intriguing. As a result, it is difficult to search for patterns in the isotopic ratios of volatiles that precede the sun because they simply don't last in the intense circumstances of star formation for long enough to leave a legible record.

But Nie added, "We found patterns in the distribution of our potassium isotopes that were inherited from pre-solar materials and differed between types of meteorites using very sensitive and suitable instruments."

They discovered that some of the solar system's oldest meteorites, known as carbonaceous chondrites, formed in the outer solar system and contained more potassium isotopes created by enormous stellar explosions known as supernovae. While other meteorites—known as non-carbonaceous chondrites—contain the same potassium isotope ratios found on Earth and in other parts of the inner solar system, including those that strike the planet more frequently.

This indicates that the materials between the outer regions of the solar system, where carbonaceous chondrites evolved, and the inner solar system, where humans dwell, were not distributed equally, Shahar said.

The origins of the volatile elements on Earth have been a long-standing research goal for Carnegie Earth and planetary scientists. Some of these components could have come all the way from the outer solar system and been carried here by carbonaceous chondrites. But since the distribution of pre-solar potassium isotopes in non-carbonaceous chondrites matched that of Earth, these meteorites are most likely the planet's potassium's primary source.

Shahar said, "It was only lately that scientists questioned a long-held assumption that the solar nebula that gave birth to our sun was hot enough to burn up all volatile components. This study offers new proof that volatiles could have survived the birth of the sun.

More investigation is required to incorporate this new knowledge into our models of planet formation and see whether it modifies any ingrained notions about how Earth and its neighbours originated.

Under the terms of a Creative Commons licence, this article has been taken from PHYSOORG. Go here to read the original article.